This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue here with our American stories, and we love telling stories from the

great American literature canon. You've probably

read Walt Whitman, or at least you were supposed to in your high school English class. But even

if you've heard of leaves of grass, you've probably never heard this tale that Hillsdale

College Professor Kelly Franklin brings us. It was winter in 1862, and Americans were fighting our nation's civil war.

In mid-December, the Union suffered a disaster at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The entrenched Confederates cut down wave after wave of Union soldiers,

leaving the Northern Army with 13,000 casualties more than double those of the Southern defenders.

From the Union standpoint, things looked pretty bleak for the formerly United States of America.

News of the casualties hit the papers right away, and on December 16 16th the American writer Walt Whitman learned

that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg. With no other information, Whitman set

out to find his brother. He searched the hospitals in D.C. with no luck until a friend lent him

money and got him a pass to the front front where George, if he were still alive,

might be found. Then, in Falmouth, Virginia, Whitman located his brother safe and sound with only

a minor wound to his face. But Whitman also saw something else, something he never forgot. Outside a field hospital, Whitman saw a heap of amputated limbs,

enough to fill a one-horse cart, horrified, he wrote in his diary.

At the foot of a tree immediately in front, a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments,

cut, bloody, black and blue blue swelled and sickening by 1862 Walt Whitman had already achieved some fame and some notoriety as a poet that celebrated the human body I am the poet of the body he had written in his 1855 book Leaves of Grass and I am the poet of the body. He had written in his 1855 book Leaves of Grass. And I am the

poet of the soul. The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred. But in that grisly

moment outside the field hospital, Whitman got his first real glimpse of the human cost of the Civil War.

It wasn't long before he knew what he wanted to do about it. In January of 1863, Whitman returned

...